It has long been known that water leakage into basements is a significant and continuous problem. Most basements are currently built from concrete or cinder block construction, and if water lays against the basement wall from the outside, seeping in through the ground, there will frequently be leakage of water through the wall and into the basement.
Many attempts have been made to solve that problem, and there are many different types of building codes and requirements necessary to try to solve the problem. For example, most walls are built on a concrete footer with the footer extending for at least a few inches laterally from the concrete wall itself, and most building codes require that there be a footer water drain which lays immediately adjacent the footer normally in a gravel bed and where the drain tile is a multiple perforated plastic tubing of about six to eight inches diameter, and with the gravel extending up over the top of the drain tile. What happens frequently that mud or silt seeping from the soil that then is placed over the gravel will tend to clog the gravel and/or get down and clog the drain tile itself so that it does not function properly. Once the drain tile is not functioning properly, water tends to back up and lay against the basement wall leading to water leakage into the basement.
The building codes also all usually require some type of sealant to be placed on the wall itself, such as tar or a parging material, with this sealant extending slightly above ground level and clear down to the footer.
Various other techniques have been incorporated to prevent water leakage into the basement wall to deal with the leakage itself after it occurs. These are represented by my own previous U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,590,722 and 4,612,742. These techniques, however, deal really with solving the problem of the water once it gets into the basement. Hence, this instant invention deals with trying to prevent the water from getting into the basement in the first place.